Grammy-award-winning artist Leyla McCalla is back on the Hall One stage, performing her deeply personal, highly-acclaimed new album, Breaking The Thermometer.

Combining original compositions and traditional Haitian tunes with historical broadcasts and contemporary interviews, Leyla McCalla’s remarkable new album, Breaking The Thermometer, offers an immersive sonic journey through a half century of racial, social, and political unrest as it explores the legacy of Radio Haiti—the first radio station to report in Haitian Kreyòl, the voice of the people—and the journalists who risked their lives to broadcast it.

McCalla’s performances here are captivating, fueled by rich, sophisticated melodic work and intoxicating Afro-Caribbean rhythms, and the juxtaposition of voices—English and Kreyòl, personal and political, anecdotal and journalistic—is similarly entrancing, raising the dead while shining a light on the enduring spirit of the Haitian people.

McCalla isn’t just some detached observer, though; she writes with great insight and introspection on the album, grappling with memory, identity, and her own experiences as a Haitian-American woman, unraveling layers of marginalization and generations of repression and resolve in search of a clearer vision of herself and her role as an artist. The result is at once a work of radical performance art, historical scholarship, and personal memoir, a wide-ranging and powerful meditation on family and democracy and free expression that couldn’t have arrived at a more timely moment.

‘Starkly beautiful, the melodies graceful and the message compelling’ **** Songlines Magazine
‘A powerful history of Haitian journalism in the music form’ Uncut